


a girl of routine

by pyrophane



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-25 15:11:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7537639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrophane/pseuds/pyrophane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the winter, Hana runs into a not-quite-familiar girl, and doesn’t return to volleyball.</p><blockquote>
  <p>“Oh!” she exclaims. “You’re—I know you, you’re the, um, you were the manager from Johzenji, right?”</p>
  <p>“That’s me,” Hana says, slotting the books back into her arms. It’s almost strange to hear the title again.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	a girl of routine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Paltita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paltita/gifts).



> hi Paltita! it was a pleasure to write one of my favourite ships for you, though this fic ended up as more of an extended closure arc for hana than a technical shipfic… i tried my best to hint at as many of your prompts as possible. thank you for your gorgeous, inspirational art of these two, and i hope you enjoy!
> 
> thanks to the usual suspects rin, ivy, and lily for looking over this.

 

 

 

 

 

The week’s assigned readings on production-possibility frontiers spill out of Hana’s arms and onto the ground. She stares at them for a moment, then at the girl who’s just crashed into her. She looks familiar. Hana thinks they might be in the same economics lecture.

“I’m so sorry!” the girl shouts, hands aflutter. “I can’t believe I just—I’m so sorry!”

“It’s fine! Don’t worry about it,” Hana says, but the girl is already swooping down to gather up the fallen books. She stands up to deposit them into Hana’s arms, meets Hana’s eyes for the first time, and reels back.

“Oh!” she exclaims. “You’re—I know you, you’re the, um, you were the manager from Johzenji, right?”

“That’s me,” Hana says, slotting the books back into her arms. It’s almost strange to hear the title again. “Misaki Hana.” A vague recollection of a girl in orange and black clapping her cheeks in front of a bathroom mirror surfaces. “You were… Karasuno?”  

“Yep,” the girl says. “Michimiya Yui. I was the captain of the Karasuno Girls’ team. Nice to meet you!”

“Nice to meet you too, Michimiya-san,” Hana says. “Ah… my last match was against your boys’ team at Spring High. How did you guys go?”

“I retired after Interhigh,” Michimiya says, “but we got to the third round. Sawamura was telling me about the—Sawamura’s the Karasuno captain, you might—well, anyway, he was telling me about the Johzenji match—he said you guys had a really unique playing style.”

“Um, yeah, I think the other schools used to call us the ‘party team,’” Hana says. _Unique_ is certainly a delicate way of putting it. The ghost of that familiar resentment rears its head, but it’s only a memory, and Michimiya doesn’t know that particular piece of history, anyway. Hana would take the compliment in earnest if it was her place to do so.

“Actually,” Michimiya says, thumbing the back of her neck, “the reason I recognised you—you probably don’t remember, but—first year at Interhigh, we wished each other luck in the girls’ bathroom! I just remember ‘cause I thought it was weird you hadn’t warmed up yet since you were still wearing your tracksuit—I thought you were on the Johzenji girls’ team? I didn’t realise you weren’t until Spring High.” She trails off into a little self-conscious laugh. “And you were, like, even holding a notebook and everything.”

“Johzenji doesn’t have a girls’ team,” Hana finds herself saying, inanely, then flushes with shame. “But—I do. Remember, that is. I really appreciated you saying it, it was still my first match as a manager, even if I wasn’t, um. On the court.”

She’d walked into the bathroom to splash some water on her face, stomach doing its best impression of a contortionist’s routine without regard for the fact that she wasn’t even going to be on the court. Halfway through the door she realised she’d forgotten to put her manager’s notebook down, and she’d been about to turn back when a girl—Michimiya, she knows now—appeared at the other end of the corridor. She’d started, then smiled, calling out _good luck!_

 _You too,_ Hana replied, returning the smile. The knot in her stomach loosened, and she’d carried that lightness all through her first match, and first victory. There’s the lightness again, fluttering behind her breastbone, as she looks at Michimiya now.

“Well,” Michimiya says, “that’s still important! The manager’s indispensable to the team. I’d have liked to have a manager to talk things through with, maybe it’d—anyway, that doesn’t matter. Are you free right now? There’s a nice cafe not too far away; let me make it up to you.” She gestures at the books.  

“I’m free, but you don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Michimiya says, and laughs. “Besides, Tokyo’s such a big city—it’s nice to see a sort-of-familiar face around! Say, aren’t we in the same economics lecture?”  

“I think so,” Hana says. Then, cautiously, unfolding: “If you’re sure, then I can pay next time?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every Tuesday, Hana jolts awake at precisely 5:45 AM and gropes blindly about for her track jacket, before remembering that she doesn’t have to catch the 6:03 bus to get to Johzenji in time for morning training anymore. She’s managed to train her body out of waking up at an unconscionable hour on Thursdays and Fridays, but the early Tuesday mornings are a habit she hasn’t broken yet. She is a girl of routine, though, so in some ways the ritual is comforting. Hana expects that she’ll resent the lost hour of sleep once the exams begin to stack up; for now she stays in bed and reaches for her phone.

There are fifty-two unread messages from Shirofuku, probably recounting some anecdote entirely in emoji form. She ignores her and replies to Yaku, who’s asking about homework. Her thumb hovers over Okudake’s contact details. She sighs. What would she say to him? _How could you bear to leave it all behind? Should I have left, too?_ Pointless and wistful; it seems ridiculous to want to reconcile when there isn’t even any sort of enmity in the first place, only a sense of insurmountable distance that she’s sure exists only in her own mind. Besides, it’s far too early in the day for anything that feels so significant, though it should mean nothing more than catching up with an old friend. Instead, she opens up her emails. One responsibility at a time.

Runa sends her a rambling, overly-polite email every month, full of offhand observations about the team like _Numajiri-kun’s grown another three centimetres and he never lets Futamata-kun live it down,_ or _W_ _e can do that synchronised attack we tried against Karasuno last year now, I think Bobata-kun might have cried a bit the first time he got it right._ Conspicuously absent are any details about her own life, like she’s excised herself clean out of the team narrative. Hana doesn’t know what to say to her about this. She’d done it too, before, holding herself away from the team as if she were an intruder claiming a share in something she had no right to, hadn’t earned. The terrifying newness of having a team under her care.

When she'd been a first-year she repeated it to herself sometimes, and each time the syllables rolled off her tongue there was the same shocked satisfaction at being part of something greater than she was. _My team._ All she needed to do was say the word and the team would rearrange like folded paper—she wouldn't, of course, not before she knew enough to direct them like that, but she _could_ , and in the meantime there were the myriad little machinations of a manager to tend to.

As the years went on the idea of it only grew more distant, until one day she woke up as the last third-year on the team and felt sick to her stomach at the prospect of walking into the gym, blinking the glare of the floodlights away, settling onto the bleachers with her manager’s notebook full of plays they would never use. She’d done it anyway, the weight of the notebook leaden in her lap.

And now, four years later, she still wakes up before dawn on Tuesdays, regular as clockwork, the only indication that she had done anything of import at all. Her body remembering, despite it all. She has always been a girl of routine.

 _We all miss you a lot, Hana-san,_ Runa’s latest missive reads. _Everyone is working hard to make you and the other senpais proud!_

Hana skims through her half-drafted reply, stifling a yawn. The idea of being someone others could look up to or even emulate chafes; she was a manager, not a captain. Okudake had always been the one who navigated the intricacies of team dynamics. Hana’s no good at that kind of careful balancing act. The thought of what Michimiya would do bubbles up unbidden, and she shakes it from her head in irritation.

 _You should tell me about yourself, too_ , she adds, at the end of her email. _I’d love to know!_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Sit down, make yourself at home! Please, um, ignore the mess,” Michimiya says. “Do you want anything? Tea, coffee, water…?”

“Just water is fine, thank you,” Hana says, smoothing down her skirt in an effort to occupy her fingers. When Michimiya invited her over to her apartment to study for their upcoming exams, Hana had found no reason not to accept other than an odd sort of anticipatory nervousness coiling in her stomach. For want of anything else to do, she unzips her satchel and arranges her books on the coffee table.

Her gaze catches on a little green box stuffed beneath the table. “Hey, is that a karuta set?”

“Yeah!” Michimiya walks out of the kitchen carrying two glasses of water. “My roommate, Ayase, she plays competitively, so there’s karuta stuff everywhere. She’s hardly ever here, though, she’s always practising at a friend’s place. I’ve got no ear for it, I just play against my brothers at new year’s sometimes.”

“I was in the karuta club in middle school,” Hana says. She’d made it to Class C. Her coach had told her she had an eye for detail, one that translated well into managing. “Johzenji didn’t have a karuta club, so I joined the volleyball club instead.”

“Maybe you could play against Ayase if she happens to be around—” A loud series of squeaks interrupts Michimiya, and Hana starts. “That’s my hamster,” Michimiya says, laughing. She points at a cage under the window that Hana had somehow missed. “Her name’s Chips.”

Chips the hamster regards Hana with a beady eye, then scurries over to the water dispenser.

“Oh,” Hana says. “She’s very—cute?”

“I got her two years ago when I was made captain—oh!” She lights up, seizing Hana’s hands. “That reminds me—did you want to sign up for the university team? I think registrations have closed, but I can try to put in a good word for you if you want, or we can practise together with a few others if you don’t want to do competitions and things—”

“No,” Hana says, too forcefully, then as a hasty afterthought, “But thank you, though. It’s just—I’m done with volleyball. I’m not—I won’t look back. I don’t want to leave any space for regrets.”

Michimiya blinks, but recovers. “That’s fine! If you change your mind, the offer’s always there.”

The words hang in the space between them for several beats. Michimiya is still grasping Hana’s hands, her callused spiker’s grip firm and sure. Hana glances down at Michimiya’s fingers curled around her own; Michimiya seems to realise this at the same time and lets go. The moment diffuses, though Hana can still feel the lingering warmth of Michimiya’s skin against hers, faint as the press of a sheet of notebook paper.

“I’ll—keep that in mind,” Hana says. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Michimiya says, giving her a thumbs-up. She motions at the notes spread out on the table. “So, shall we?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hana learns a lot about Michimiya over the following weeks, including but not limited to: she likes the terrible NHK morning dramas but not the variety shows, she talks with her hands, she tends to tuck her hair behind her ears when she’s flustered, and her eyes curve up into crescents when she smiles. This last point is especially noticeable when she smiles at Hana, which is, in Hana’s opinion, far too often. All of these details are beginning to accumulate into something of an _issue_ , but Hana’s well-versed in the art of gathering information and saying nothing about it. At least her managerial experience is good for something.

She introduces Michimiya to Shirofuku and Yaku, and Michimiya introduces her to Sawamura, who, as it happens, is on the national volleyball team with Yaku. It also turns out that Shirofuku was Fukurodani’s manager during high school. It’s possible that Hana’s life has become one big volleyball conspiracy. But it’s all settled into its own sort of routine. More often than not she walks to and from classes together with Michimiya. Hana’s careful not to read too much into this.  

Today, Michimiya is chatting animatedly to a silver-haired person over by the library steps. The wind needles at Hana’s exposed skin, and she shoves her hands into her pockets, wishing she’d grown out her bangs for a little more protection against the cold. As Hana draws near, Michimiya lifts her head and smiles so brightly Hana’s step falters. She latches onto Hana’s arm as soon as she’s within reach.

“Misaki! This is Sugawara Koushi, we went to the same high school! Actually, he was—”

“Karasuno’s reserve setter,” says Hana. “I remember.” She dips her head. “Misaki Hana. It’s lovely to meet you, Sugawara-san.”

Sugawara bows in return, regards her with calm, inquisitive eyes. “Likewise. Johzenji’s manager, right?”

“Yeah,” says Hana, a breath of a word that coalesces into a little silvery puff in front of her. Her final match as a manager; of course she remembers. The team had been watching the Karasuno captain, seeking out his steady warmth on the court in the same way they used to look to Okudake, but it was Karasuno’s benched vice-captain Hana’s eyes were drawn to. Sugawara Koushi, third-year reserve setter. Okudake had been a setter, too. She hadn’t understood why he was on the bench until Karasuno’s first-year setter tossed up the ball, and then she had.  

“Sugawara’s here for the weekend to visit his _boyfriend_ ,” says Michimiya, poking at Sugawara’s cheek, “and deigned to stop by and catch up with a poor old friend like me—”

He laughs. “You say that like he isn’t your friend as well—you’d know him too, Misaki-san,” he says, “Seijou’s old setter—Oikawa Tooru.”

Hana raises her eyebrows. Oikawa Tooru’s jump serve had blown Johzenji’s defence into smithereens all four times they’d met in competition; she has three pages detailing his strengths and weaknesses in her old notebook. He’s a larger-than-life figure in her mind, and it’s difficult to imagine him doing anything as mundane as walking down the street with Sugawara. “Who _doesn’t_ know Oikawa Tooru?”

“Don’t tell him that, though, he’ll be impossible to handle.” Sugawara’s eyes crinkle up at the corners. “Hey, are you on the team with Michimiya?”

“No,” Hana says. She doesn’t owe him an explanation, though something about him makes her feel she should give him one. “I stopped with volleyball after high school. Though, I mean, for some reason everyone I know here plays.”

“Something about devoting your formative years to the same thing,” Sugawara says, cheerful, “though it isn’t quite so bad with your regular brand of volleyball players—people like Tooru, they breathe volleyball, it’s practically impossible to relate to them if you’ve never—”

“Sorry, but can we head inside first?” Michimiya interrupts, fingers tightening on Hana’s arm. “It’s so cold I can’t feel half my face.”

“Sure,” Sugawara says. He peers at Hana, gaze contemplative, all contained intensity. Maybe it’s something unique to setters. He and Oikawa Tooru are a fitting match after all. “Lead the way.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After Sugawara leaves to meet up with his boyfriend, Michimiya insists on Hana coming over to her apartment. She busies herself in the kitchen while Hana perches on the edge of the couch, watching Chips burrow into her shredded paper bedding.

“Thanks for earlier, by the way,” Hana blurts, when Michimiya emerges from the kitchen. “With Sugawara-san.”

“It’s no problem.” Michimiya places a steaming mug of tea in front of Hana; she accepts it gratefully, wrapping her fingers around the ceramic to warm them up. “I figured you probably didn’t want to, um. Talk about it.”

“It’s not that I left on bad terms or anything,” Hana says, suddenly stricken. “Nothing as serious as that. I didn’t—it’s not what you’re thinking.”

Michimiya sits down beside Hana. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says, “but if you do—I’ll listen.”

“It’s—my team didn’t need me,” Hana says, setting her cup down on the table. The contact makes an ugly noise. “I didn’t—get through to them until it was too late. All I ended up doing was saying a few words halfway through my last match when I already knew we were going to lose. When my old captain left after Interhigh, he told me to watch over the team. That they’d listen to me. It was the right thing to say, but I couldn’t—I didn’t believe it, and then it was over, and I couldn’t say anything else even if I wanted to. You must know.” She turns to Michimiya, knocking their knees together. “You were a captain, too.” _Tell me_ , she wants to say _, did I do right by my team?_ But this isn’t Michimiya’s responsibility to bear. It’s her own, and sometimes it is a physical ache between her ribs, in the pit of her stomach, at the back of her throat. A leaden, historied weight. The heaviness of familiarity.

“I wasn’t—I wasn’t a good captain,” Michimiya says, slowly. “The girls wouldn’t practise, and I couldn’t make them do it, and then we lost. But I think—I don’t think you can blame yourself for not saying anything earlier. You stayed, didn’t you? You knew what it meant and you stayed anyway, for as long as the team needed you—that’s worth something. That means you did your job well.”

Michimiya puts a hand to her temple, an incidental movement. In the weak drizzle of light through the frost-flecked window it carries more weight than it should. This must have been how she looked in the aftermath of a lost match before she gathered herself up, pushing her hair behind her ears to face her team.

“You did, too,” Hana says. “You stayed as well! But it isn’t the same—you were the captain. It meant more for you, staying.”

“And you were the manager. Our responsibilities might’ve been… different, but yours weren’t any less important,” Michimiya says, almost gentle, though Hana can hardly breathe. “Your old captain must have told you that, too. You must’ve known.”

Knowledge comes in absolutes: either you possess it, or you don’t. It's a manager’s domain. The advantage therefore lies in collecting as much as possible in the hope that some of it will turn out to be useful, but that isn’t all there is to it: it needs to be shared, too. Hana’s always been adept at the first. She is learning, she thinks, how to do the second.

Michimiya is barely a hand’s breadth away, eyes wide and shatteringly sincere. It wouldn’t take much to reach out and place a hand on the curve of her neck, or curl her fingers along the side of her face. She would’ve liked to manage for Michimiya. She would’ve liked to go over statistics and strategies with her, heads bent together over Hana’s notebook, laying out the groundwork for the team.

“I should go,” Hana says, standing up. The phrases fit awkwardly in her mouth. “Thank you. For—the tea. And—everything.”

“Of course,” Michimiya says, rising to her feet as well. There’s a note in her tone that Hana can’t quite place. It sounds almost like disappointment. “I’ll see you out.”

Hana is a girl of routine, but this time she reaches out and catches Michimiya’s wrist, barely conscious of her own actions. Michimiya’s skin is warm against her fingers; her eyes fly open, lips parting as though to ask a question, and before Hana can lose her resolve she leans in towards Michimiya and kisses her.

When the kiss breaks Michimiya stares at her, flushed, and moves her hand upwards, but Hana’s fingers are already tucking the stray wisp of hair behind Michimiya’s ear.

“Oh,” Michimiya says, faintly, then breaks into a grin, and kisses Hana again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the safety of her own apartment, Hana looks at her phone in her hand, and makes a choice. The dial tone rings once, twice, three times, and then—

“Hello?”

“Okudake-kun,” she says, throat tight for some indiscernible reason. “It’s, um—this is Misaki. Misaki Hana. My old phone broke, so, um…”

“Oh!” A faint rustling sound from his end. “Misaki, hey! How are you?”

“I’m—fine, thank you. What about you?”

“Pretty well! It’s good to hear a familiar voice for once.” He laughs, and like that all of Hana’s half-formed worries about some kind of melodramatic divide between them are dispelled. “Did you want to talk about something?”

“Actually, I was calling to ask for some advice.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s just,” Hana swallows, “when you left the team, you told me they’d listen to me. Do you think—even though I wasn’t—” _you,_  “—the captain, just the manager, I did—an alright job with them?”

“Of course,” Okudake says immediately. “You were just as much a part of the team as I was, no ‘just’ about it. I meant what I said—all of it. I entrusted the care of the team to you because I knew you’d—do the best job with them. Better than alright.”

They talk a while longer about university life, about the team’s progress. Runa’s email for the month had ended with a hesitant line about her latest civics assignment, and how she’d recently befriended Karasuno’s new manager. Hana relays the information to Okudake, smiling. They make tentative plans to visit the team soon, before Interhigh. It’ll be good to see it for themselves.

“Thank you,” Hana says at last, fingers tightening on the smooth plastic of her phone.

“Anytime,” Okudake says. “Hey—I mean it. We’re friends, yeah? Let’s keep in touch.”

After she hangs up, she texts him her email address and a thumbs-up emoji; a few moments later her screen lights up with Okudake’s reply. Something curiously light blooms in her chest. She glances at the clock on her desk, the numbers slowly ticking over, no memory of what they had been before but reliant on that history regardless. She picks up her phone again. She calls Michimiya.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Hana thinks of Okudake it is always as a silhouetted figure in the doorway of the faculty advisor’s office, bleeding an indistinct orange glow around the edges. She’d been folding cranes for Tanabata. Nine hundred and ninety-one were already strung up around her in Johzenji’s cheery yellow and crisp white. She hadn’t turned the lights on yet, though light from the hallway outside was leaking into the room. She was opening up the wings, the paper in her hands still unrecognisable as its final iteration, when Okudake told her he’d decided to leave the team. She hadn’t understood, and then she had. She told him she would take care of the paperwork. After he left, she finished the crane in her hands, and folded the last eight. Then she stood up and left the room too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I haven’t played as setter in a really long time,” says Michimiya, anxiously turning the ball over in her hands, “so, um—please don’t mind me if I mess it up.”

“Don’t worry, I’m probably just going to miss the ball outright,” says Hana. There’s nobody else in the gym this late, which is fortunate. She doesn’t think she’d be able to follow through on this otherwise.

She shrugs off her jacket, shakes loose her limbs and with them, the sensation of something incumbent, burgeoning. Fragile as the cobwebs she used to sweep out from the corners of the Johzenji gym storeroom, another unremarkable facet of a duty she’d chosen and kept choosing despite it all, and surely that was reason enough to try again.

“Ready?”

Hana exhales. “Yeah.”

The ball leaves Michimiya’s hands in a slow, sure arc. Hana knows this play in theory, from the panoramic bird's-eye view of the uppermost bleacher, but the spiker's perspective is something else altogether. She jumps. She reaches back, slams her arm down, momentum into motion.  
  
The ball thuds onto the other side of the court and rolls off somewhere to the side where it’ll have to be retrieved later, but for now Hana stands in its meteorite crater, breathes in its aftermath. The skin of her palms tingling in recognition.

Behind her, Michimiya is laughing, clear and warm. “Nice kill!” she shouts, and flings her arms around Hana. She stills at the unexpected contact, then softens.

“Thank you,” Hana says, and there it is, fainter, less forthcoming, but unmistakeable nonetheless: that shocked satisfaction. That belief that she could make more out of herself.

“Earlier, at my place—I wanted to say more to you, but I didn’t know what. But I’ve been thinking. I know you don’t want to go back to volleyball or anything,” Michimiya says, leaning back to seize Hana’s shoulders, “but—it wasn’t all bad, was it? Your team. I think—they were very grateful to you. For everything that you did. And you must’ve felt—something for volleyball, in the beginning. Don’t you think—don’t you think you should let yourself have at least that?”

“I—” Hana starts, but Michimiya presses on.

“What I’m trying to say is—a manager can see things from afar that a captain can’t, but there are things that a captain can see from up close that a manager can’t. You need both perspectives for the whole picture.”

“I know,” Hana says, because she does, because she’s been saying it to herself for three years as though it could become fact through repetition. Perhaps it had, by the end. She flexes her hands, consideringly.

“This doesn’t have to mean anything,” Michimiya says, at last. “Only what you want it to.”

She can do anything with this, she thinks, the court as new and open to her as a smooth sheet of paper. Knowledge in all its forms is a manager’s area of expertise, and it falls to the twinned judgement of the captain and the manager to determine what to make of it.

“Can you set to me again?” Hana says. “Let’s see how we go.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave a comment! tumblr post of this fic is [here](http://delineative.tumblr.com/post/148425345115/fic-a-girl-of-routine) <3
> 
> [tumblr](http://delineative.tumblr.com) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/ennezahard)


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